SOURCE: Clasby, Nancy T. “‘The Life You Save May Be Your Own’: Flannery O'Connor as a Visionary Artist.” Studies in Short Fiction 28, no. 4 (fall 1991): 509-20.

In the following essay, Clasby offers a Jungian reading of “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.”

Flannery O'Connor's reservations about psychoanalytic readings of her work have not deterred several critics from producing interesting Freudian and Lacanian studies. Some of these studies attribute O'Connor's rejection of psychoanalytic commentary to her unacknowledged fear of the unconscious as “a material realm that threatens to displace the domain of ‘spirit’” (Mellard 628). It may be, however, that her reservations are based in part on an accurate perception of the limits of Freudian thought as applied to the image-making activity of the artist. The “bleeding stinking mad shadow[s] of Jesus” peopling O'Connor's stories cannot successfully be reduced to portraits of individuals suffering castration anxiety. Carl Jung's...